Of the many timely and clarifying contributions made by Joseph
Black’s new edition of the Martin Marprelate Tracts, readers will find none as
vital as the straightforward purpose at its heart: “To encourage more direct
familiarity with one of the most remarkable voices of early modern English
prose” (cxiii). In this objective, as even a cursory inspection of the
modernized and fully annotated texts suggests, the edition succeeds admirably. An
additional benefit, however, awaits readers in the meticulous, orderly
introduction in which Black supplies an apparatus designed not only to review the
relevant contexts behind the clandestine Marprelate printing operation but to ruminate
over the strikingly wide-ranging effects of Tudor England’s most notorious scandal.

As many readers will recall, Marprelate’s distinctive approach to
religious reform married conventional calls for the elimination of the English
episcopacy with comic-abusive, ad hominem attacks on Church dignitaries.
Following closely on the heels of the Armada’s defeat, this verbal violence scandalized
as much of England as could be scandalized by printed material in 1588-89. Not
surprisingly, Elizabeth was impressed with neither Marprelate’s advocacy of a Presbyterian
ecclesiology nor his gleeful willingness to discuss the personal lives of her
bishops. The authorities moved quickly, proscribing the seven Marprelate
publications and organizing a national manhunt for the roaming press from which
the tracts were issued. Eventually, most of the operation’s printers,
distributors, patrons, and contributors were captured. All faced examination and
fines, and the late-Elizabethan state went on to wage cultural war against
Puritanism, all the while keeping vigilant guard against any return of what
Richard Hooker called the “scurrilous and more then Satyricall immodestie” of
“Martinisme.”[1]

Black prints
each of the Marprelate tracts with a brief, two-page introduction, and plentiful
notes—236 alone for the first tract, The Epistle—that offer readers a most
adept, if not complete, guide to the many topical allusions contained in the
tracts. Those who know the tracts are aware of the thousands of gossipy
anecdotes and obscure references that Marprelate’s shifting, colloquial voice
tenders in support of his cause. No major Church official emerges unscathed,
and tracking down the specifics, not to mention the accuracy, of the behavior
to which Marprelate objects can be daunting, especially across 200 pages of
text. But, to be sure, Black has crafted a sensible and efficient edition that,
in presenting “Martinism” in an uncluttered and sturdy format, supplants William
Pierce’s century-old edition, which can be difficult to obtain, or the nearly-unreadable
1967 Scolar Press facsimile. As Black acknowledges, Pierce was no unaccomplished
editor, but his texts of the tracts are far from error-free and his anti-episcopal
commentary less than impartial. By contrast, the Scolar edition contains neither
preface nor annotations, and its low-quality facsimiles tend to result in exasperation—and
depleted vision—instead of edification. A few on-line versions of the tracts
exist as well, but these, too, fall well short of the accuracy and diligence that mark Black's edition.

Since editing the Marprelate pamphlets is not an entirely
straightforward task, Black follows practices that, by necessity, reconcile an
editor’s expectations for the texts in his charge and a publisher’s discretion
about finances and sales. At issue are not multiple printings of the 1588-89
texts but rather the Marprelate syndicate’s extraordinary use of text and page
as a provocative arena of dialogical conflict. With their arresting lack of
punctuation, especially quotation marks, and ingenuous deployment of mocking margins
and headers, the tracts experiment with new forms of “polemical aggressiveness”
(xix). In so doing, however, they also present nearly as many challenges to
the modern editor as to the Elizabethan Church officials who had difficulty “in
learning to read Martin’s text” (lix). While the choice to modernize the
texts was never in doubt, Black wisely preserves the spelling of the many
colloquialisms, nonce words, and idiomatic expressions employed by the Martinist
persona to simulate a public, street-level debate over religious reform. He
also retains dialogue and some quoted material as it appears in the original
texts—without quotation marks and chaotically disorganized. This way, readers
can appreciate the sheer exuberance and taunting elusiveness of Martinist
dialogue:

Whau, whau, but where have I been all this while? Ten to
one among some of these puritans. Why Martin? Why Martin I say, hast tow
forgotten thyself? Where hast ti been, why man, cha bin a-seeking for a
salmon’s nest, and cha vound a whole crew, either of ecclesiastical traitors,
or of bishops of the devil, of broken and maimed members of the church: never
wink on me good fellow, for I will speak the truth, let the puritans do what
they can. (Hay any Work for Cooper 126)

Thus, the volatile
cacophony of dialects offered by Marprelate remains perceptible to readers who
may not, at first, sense the polemical sophistication behind such a highly
self-reflexive mixture of voices and idioms.

Black,
however, could not avoid making alterations to the “mise en page of the
original productions” since the “exigencies of modern printing” demanded painful
sacrifices (cxv). For instance, the running heads of the tracts are not
printed above the texts and are instead swept to a rear appendix. This is most
disappointing in regard to the second tract, The Epitome, which contains
over 40 headings, including such sneers as “John of London, John of Exeter, and
Thomas Winchester, hypocrites” and “All beetleheaded ignorance, lieth not in M.
Doctor” (210-11). More damaging is the displacement of Marprelate’s compelling
marginal comments. Rather than printing them alongside the text, the edition
reproduces them as footnotes. As a result, readers are deprived of the
physical representation of the verbal conflict that so scandalized early modern
commentators yet so impresses modern readers. To get a sense, then, of the
tracts’ original formatting of discursive chaos, readers must return to the
Scolar facsimile or consult the on-line EEBO versions. Only then do we
actually see the import of such jocular and irreverent comments as “Can bishops
face, cog, lie and cozen or no, think you” and “Ha, priests, I’ll bang you, or
else never trust me” (33, 19). This marginalia, as Black admits, contributes
much to Marprelate’s innovative take on religious polemic: “Martin’s critique…extends
into all available textual space: his mockingly discursive titles, facetious
imprints, self-reflective and conversational marginal notes, inventive running
heads…all become sites for polemical point-scoring” (xxviii-xxix).

While Black
may not be able to supply the tracts’ enhanced “point-scoring” space, his 90-page
introduction expertly reviews the historical conditions leading up to
Marprelate’s emergence. The introduction is divided into seven segments,
ranging from the obligatory (“The Presbyterian background,” “Martinist style,”
and “Authorship”) to the refreshingly new (“The Martinist community and the
Marprelate press” and “Martinism and anti-Martinism, 1590-1700”). A genuine
scholarly humility orders Black’s approach—a necessity given the enormous
reaction the tracts provoked not only in 1589-90 but throughout the next
century. Beyond the style and satirical strategies of the tracts themselves,
Black considers dozens of official and non-official responses, and expanding a
thesis first spelled out a decade ago, claims that “Martinist and
anti-Martinist works participated in a complex dialogue” and “are collaborative
discourses” (lxxiii).[2]
Extending this ethos to the authorship question, Black’s final claim about the
John Penry-Job Throkmorton rivalry is instructive: “To reduce Martin to an
individual author is in many ways to deprive the tracts of the textual and
concomitant moral authority he sought to invoke” (xlvii). At its simplest, the
goal of the Marprelate syndicate—of which Penry and Throkmorton were only a
part—was to push the issue of religious reform into the public arena. With the
help of a hypersensitive Church, it succeeded, until, as C. S. Lewis has
suggested, the Martinist persona “who first used gas in this war found…that he
was repudiated by his own higher command and that the enemy had gases much more
deadly than his.”[3]

Surely the most unexpected yet valuable contribution of the introduction
is Black’s suggestion for future study of the tracts. Much has been written
on Marprelate, especially of late, but unfortunately, much of it remains
derivative and thus limited. Black outlines several new directions of study in
order to push scholarship toward a more demanding and rigorous consideration of
Marprelate’s “appeal to a popular audience” (xxxiv). Chief among them is the
suggestion that we view the invitational nature of the tracts as part of a trend
that encouraged reading which was “aloud, to communal enjoyment, [and] in a collective
act of public ridicule” (lxxxv). From Black’s perspective, this enticement to
participate in a larger dialogue accounts for the extraordinary lasting power
of the Martinist persona, which was continually resurrected throughout the
seventeenth century “as an exemplary voice of reform-minded opposition”
(lxxxv).

As complete as the introduction is, some minor gaps remain, but none
is so pertinent as to obstruct our enhanced investigation of the tracts. A
nineteenth-century history of the tracts by a Catholic priest, William Maskell,
goes unmentioned—a shame considering Maskell, for all his partisanship (and cheeky
anti-Americanism), was an early advocate of collaborative authorship and
acknowledged that the Marprelate scandal “was not only the great controversy of
that year, but the controversy of the Elizabethan age.”[4] (Maskell is listed in
the bibliography, however.) Some attention to Richard Verstegen’s letters
would have revealed additional references to Marprelate, whose attacks on the English Church were celebrated by the Catholic opposition on the Continent. (Black is
otherwise very attentive to Catholic responses to Marprelate.) Finally, perhaps
space might have been found for a more substantial consideration of an
important letter by Sir Francis Hastings, a key Puritan sympathizer among the
aristocracy, an anti-Catholic controversialist in his own right, and an associate
of many members of the Marprelate syndicate. In the 1589 letter, he repudiates
the Martinist “veyne of writinge” because “it hathe geven greate offence, and
advantage, and done no good at all.”[5]
The introduction breaks off rather abruptly, too, but at 90 pages, it fully covers
the first hundred years of Marprelate’s impressive afterlife, rendering further
analysis a luxury rather than a necessity.

Ultimately, the glut of allusions to and denunciations of Marprelate
merely attests to the popularity of the tracts and the scandal they caused
rather than any negligence on Black’s part. In fact, no one is more skilled at
tracking down such references as Black, and the introduction, from start to
finish, uncovers many new sixteenth- and seventeenth-century responses to the
tracts. If anything, Black’s tidy and capable edition gives us the tools—and
the energy—to redouble our assessments of Marprelate’s influence on the
Elizabethan Golden Age of literature and consider, all over again, this most original
and extraordinary voice of early modern opposition.

[2] See Black’s well-known article, “The Rhetoric of Reaction: The
Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588-89), Anti-Martinism, and the Uses of Print in
Early Modern England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997): 707-25.

[3] C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), 409.